A Far Country

by John Fletcher

  About A Far Country

  South Australia, 1846, and the countryside is being rapidly carved into pastures and copper mines. It’s first come, first served and no prizes for coming second. But to hold your prize you must be as tough and unforgiving as the land itself.

  A young man, Jason Hallam, shipwrecked off the Yorke Peninsula, is taken in by the Narungga clan who live there. He learns their ways, hears the whispers that the kuinyo, the white man is coming to take their land. And then black and white tragically collide.

  Jason is caught between two worlds — his best friend, Mura, is Narungga, and Alison, the girl he loves, a grazier’s daughter. What price is he prepared to pay to tread his own path, make his own rules?

  A compelling story of loyalty, loss and survival, A Far Country is alive with the beauty and brutality of a wild frontier and the people who made it their home.

  To Luke, who missed out last time, and to Stefan, who kindly gave me the use of his name

  CONTENTS

  About A Far Country

  Dedication

  Map

  PROLOGUE

  BOOK ONE: PETREL

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  BOOK TWO: STORM HAWK

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  BOOK THREE: EAGLES

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  EPILOGUE

  AUTHOR’S NOTES

  About John Fletcher

  Also by the Author

  Copyright

  PROLOGUE

  I am in torment, therefore I shall go today to the place where it happened.

  If Gavin knew he would prohibit it for fear it might upset me too much or—far worse—for fear it might not upset me at all.

  He has always believed that he knows what is good for me, what is bad for me. He has always been sure of that, as of everything. At least he had been until now, until the death of Edward Erhart Matlock, our son, aged fourteen. I do not normally take issue with my husband but today is different. It is not every day, after all, that one mourns the loss of one’s only child.

  Gavin is afraid for me, what I may do or not do. I see it in his eyes. He no longer knows me. He is a big man, hard and on occasion pitiless, as he must be if he is to have any chance of subduing this hard and pitiless land. When he heard the news of our son’s death he screamed his hurt like a baby, hands like hammers punishing the earth. He is incapable of understanding that my own sorrow is no less real for being hidden. Most women show their feelings and it offends his sense of propriety that I do not. I cannot do it. My grief is in my blood and marrow and bone, too deeply rooted to find expression in the tears and keening he expects. I see him watching my dry eyes, my face and voice without evidence of grief. He thinks I am cold.

  I cannot help what he thinks.

  All the same, it angers me. How can he think such things? He has known me seventeen years yet it is plain that he understands nothing of me, has never understood. This realisation shocks me. I am watching him—a person whom I thought as much a part of me as my breath and blood, a sharer in my fears, my joys, in eating and sleeping and loving—become a stranger before my eyes.

  Death has taken more than the breath and bone and skin, the joy and hope that was our son. So be it. I have survived everything else that life has brought me. I shall survive this.

  As soon as Gavin has left the house—it seems obscene that the daily work must continue despite death and grief, yet how can it be otherwise?—I shall go to the place where Edward died. I shall go alone. I shall say my farewells to my son in my own way. He will understand why my grief is hidden. He will not question it, he to whom all knowledge and all secrets are now revealed.

  II

  The peninsula runs from north-east to south-west. It is flat, featureless, a vast tongue of grass and scattered trees licking at the ocean. It is good country, or so Gavin believes: good for wheat, good for potatoes, good for sheep. When we first came to this continent ten years ago, with its heat and dust, its arid, enigmatic vastness, its scattering of white settlers and natives black as death, naked as air, he knew at once what he was going to do. From the moment he set eyes on this land he wanted it with an intensity that was, I now believe, closer to lust than love. He was determined to take it, by force if there were no other way; by force I would say was his preference: although why I should think such a thing I do not know. Certainly he has never used force with me, only kindness and consideration. From the first he made it easy for me to love him, this English giant who had himself been so strange to me when my father first took me from our home in western Norway to meet him.

  My father was master of a barque trading between Britain and Norway. I was fifteen when I first accompanied him; eighteen when for the last time I travelled on his vessel to the sea town in north Yorkshire where I was to be married. It was strange to leave our wooden house at the head of the fjord where the still waters reflected the cliffs that rose vertically into the air for a thousand feet on either side, stranger still to come to this other land where the houses, the people, the very air were so different from everything I had known.

  God knows what I would have thought had I realised that this preliminary foray into the world would be no more than the first step of a journey that four years later would bring me, no longer Asta Foldal but Asta Matlock, to a far country on the other side of the earth; a country so very different from the peat-dark waters, the mountains and white painted houses of home that it might have been in another universe. Not that it would have made any difference, whatever I had thought. In my father’s house I did my father’s bidding.

  Things are not so different now, after all.

  When we arrived in Australia my husband took a job with a surveying party at twenty-three shillings and sixpence a week: to spy out the land, as he put it. He spied to such good effect that within a year we had our own place on the outskirts of the city they called Adelaide, after an English queen. The land was fertile, although hot in summer, with flies and much dust. We grew wheat and ran sheep on the land we called ours but I knew from the first that we would not settle there. The presence of so many people a few miles down the road was a constant pressure in my husband’s head as, indeed, it was in mine. In north Yorkshire, as in Norway, there are few people and no dust or flies to talk of. How I missed that clean northern stillness. I said nothing, however: there was no going back. Besides, I loved my husband. At that time I still believed that love made up for all else.

  My husband also had a hunger for the north but not my north, with its stillness and clean cold air: the interior of this new land drew him like a lodestone. I was frightened by its harshness, the sense of alienation that I felt whenever I thought of it. I would be lonely there, as lonely as only a woman can be in a strange land, pursuing a dream that is not, has never been, her own.

  I would let no-one see my fear, neither Gavin nor my son Edward who had just turned fourteen and was as eager as his father to set out into the unknown. I would not let myself see it, burying it deep where I could deny its presence.

  Ian Matlock saw it, for all my efforts. That man is a devil. Gavin’s cousin, five years younger, with the sa
me yellow hair and skin baked the colour of brick by the fierce southern sun. He joined us at Gavin’s invitation two years after we first came out. I saw at once that he was as hungry for land as my husband, determined to seize whatever he could hold, whether he could put it to good use or not. He was acquisitive to the bone, and not only of land. I had met him only at my wedding; even then, I had felt the weight of his hungry eyes on me.

  Like a fool I was relieved when, a year after my own wedding, he married Mary Hunter, daughter of a Whitby shopkeeper. I was even prepared to like him for a while until I realised that nothing, neither marriage nor anything else, would ever satisfy him.

  We are as we are.

  Here, in this southern land, his rapacious glare was a hundred times heavier than it had been in England. His eyes probed for the body beneath my clothes, pricing it by the quality of skin and flesh and hair.

  Availability was irrelevant. It was not physical possession that interested him. He summed me up, knew and understood me, had me pinned like a specimen to a board. There were no secrets from those pale eyes. Being stripped naked would have felt less shameful.

  I was helpless, of course. He had done nothing. But I knew and he knew that I knew. That was the worst thing of all, the sense of violation compounded by helplessness.

  A year after Edward’s birth Mary had a daughter. They named her Alison after Ian’s mother. By the time our two families moved north in 1846 she was twelve years old. In those years before the move, we had both had other children, I two, Mary one, but none had lived. No more of that.

  On the day of our departure Ian sought me out, as I had known he would.

  ‘An adventure,’ he said, pale eyes smiling at me. ‘Nothing to be afraid of.’

  ‘Then it is fortunate that I am not afraid, is it not so?’

  He knew the truth, of course, and made sure that I saw he knew, but said nothing. Just as he never mentioned how I had never learnt to speak his language as casually as my own, yet with him I was always conscious of it as I was with no-one else.

  I have Gavin, I thought in self-defence. And Edward. But Edward, my joy and consolation, was too young to understand and Gavin, my protector and my husband, saw nothing.

  We headed north up the eastern shore of the St Vincent Gulf. We passed many drays bringing ore south to Adelaide from the recently opened copper mine they called the Burra Burra. Each dray was drawn by a team of bullocks and guided by two drovers. The noise of their whips and voices filled the hot air as did the dust churned up by their passing. The sounds passed but the dust remained; a chalky film that covered our skins, irritated our eyes, filled our lungs. At times the sun itself was obscured, an orange disc peering through grey mist. Gavin was exasperated by the unexpected presence of so many men. He craved solitude as much as space and as soon as we reached the head of the gulf we turned westwards across the range and so came into the land that we were to claim as our own.

  Our company consisted of the two families, a forty-year-old farm supervisor named Hector Gallagher and his son Blake; and three shepherds, one black, two white. We brought cattle, sheep and horses and the guns and implements we would need to establish ourselves and survive in the wilderness.

  There were no creeks, no surface water, but Gavin said nothing about turning back.

  ‘Look at the grazing,’ he said. ‘Hundreds of miles of it. There must be water underneath the soil. Or a good rainfall.’ And gazed speculatively at the cloud-free sky.

  From time to time we saw parties of blacks, as remote and mysterious as the land through which we travelled. We made ready our guns but they did not trouble us, not then. It occurred to none of us that we were intruders in a land they considered their own, nor would it have made any difference had it done so. We were here to take the land and take it we would.

  We settled at this place, a point rather more than halfway down the peninsula and close to its eastern shore, in a fold of land that we hoped would protect us from the worst of the hot north wind. There was enough timber to build a house for ourselves, another for Hector Gallagher and his son, and buildings for the animals. Ian Matlock and his wife and daughter took a property adjoining our southern boundary. Technically the flocks belonged half to Ian and half to ourselves but it was understood that they would graze in common over all the land. There were no neighbours, no fences, no lawyers to tell us where we might and might not go. Everything we saw was ours: by the power of our guns and of our will.

  From the house the land falls away eastwards until it ends at the line of cliffs, a hundred feet in height, which border the gulf. The cliffs are sheer, affording no access to the water that creams rumbling at their feet. In the air beyond the cliff edge seabirds wheel and call, white plumage bright against the blue sea. The edge of the cliff might have been cut by a knife: a line dividing what is from what cannot be.

  One day shortly after we arrived I took Edward for a walk towards the sea. I say I took Edward; in truth he took me. He had been there already, drawn by the sea, the cliffs, above all by the sense of danger that had attracted him since he first walked. I cautioned him: of course. He heard my warnings and ignored them: of course. He was not a boy to be held in a noose of words.

  He pointed. ‘There is a way down. See?’

  I looked, my toes jutting over the edge. Growing up where I had, I had no fear of cliffs, of the unprotected and beckoning air. Sure enough, there was a cleft, steep—in places almost vertical and glassy with polished rock—and marked with a thin silt of dust and loose earth. It was a trail used by animals, I thought. It ran from the cliff top twenty yards to our left to—I had to crane my neck to see—a level patch of grass, ten yards or so wide, above a final section of cliff that plunged vertically into a small inlet a few yards across that I thought might be exposed at low tide. From here it was hard to tell how high the final step was, perhaps not more than five or six feet. Not that it mattered; neither Edward nor I was going down there to find out.

  ‘Please,’ Edward pleaded, reading my thoughts.

  ‘It is too steep.’

  At home I had clambered down steeper paths than that before I was his age.

  ‘I can manage it.’

  ‘No.’

  The distant swathe of grass was cool and enticing but I would not allow myself to look at it. I turned my back, Edward following reluctantly at my heels, and walked slowly away along the edge of the cliffs, enjoying the salt breeze that cooled my face and moved the heavy weight of hair on my neck.

  ‘I could manage it easily,’ Edward complained.

  I know now that I should have permitted him to use the path but I did not. We walked on until I wished to go no further then circled back inland until we reached the house: as though by avoiding further sight of the path I would somehow put it out of his mind.

  When we reached home I put my hands on his shoulders and looked down at him. ‘I want you to promise not to climb down there.’ I shook him slightly to show how serious I was. ‘It is too dangerous. Do you understand?’

  He tried to avoid answering but I insisted. I should not have asked it; even as I spoke I knew that, given his nature, it was a promise it would be impossible for him to keep. Above all I should never have mentioned the word danger but I had done so and it was too late.

  III

  The walk through the tall grass has heated me. I wipe the sweat from my face. I can feel it running over my body beneath my clothes. My boots are covered in dust and grass seeds cling to my skirt. I take no notice of any of these things.

  The air along the cliff is still. The noise of the surf comes clearly to me. I can feel the ground tremble beneath my feet as each roller rears against the rocks and wonder how it will be in this place when the winter storms arrive. I reach the head of the track. I do not hesitate but start straight down, feeling the heat coming up out of the ground, hands grasping at knots of coarse grass, feet slipping in the loose earth. The surface of the rock is smooth as glass. It gives no handhold. Emptiness yawns be
neath my feet. I can hear the buzz of insects, feel the itch of pollen on my skin, smell the harsh dry smell of thrift and sun-hot grass. I slip and slither a yard or two, grabbing grass stems. I regain control and rest a moment, panting, eyes smarting with sweat.

  As I have told no-one where I am going, there will be no-one to help me should I need help.

  I come to a section even steeper than what has gone before. I lift my heavy skirt and tuck it into my waistband. My boots are not suitable for this sort of ground. There is a narrow crevice scratched between two flat rock faces. The rock is grooved vertically: no hand- or foot-holds there. I turn inwards to face the cliff, toes stretching for a roughness in the crevice that will provide some sort of hold. Through my straddled legs I see the sea surging against the gleaming rocks fifty feet below, hear the grate of shingle sucked to and fro by the tide. My boot rests on a roughness. Cautiously, I put pressure on it. It slips. It will never bear my weight. I turn my head with difficulty. On either side the rock stretches away.

  How did Edward get down here? The question repeats itself again and again inside my head.

  Perhaps he did not. It is the easy answer. Perhaps he slipped, as I almost slipped, and fell from this point straight into the sea. It would explain what happened. Except there were no broken bones, no lacerations as would be caused by a fall from this height. The only lesions on his skin had been caused after death, the body tumbling in the surf until it was wedged at last between the rocks.

  No. He did not fall. Even if I had never seen his body, I would have known how my son died. I can see it as clearly as if I had been there: as in one sense, perhaps, I was. I know because the same thing almost happened to me in the bleak and frigid waters of the fjord that until I die will be home to me.

  My foot stretches again, futilely, my fingertips, white with pressure, crooked around the top of the rock slab. I must not stay here too long. Do that and I shall lose my nerve to move at all, shall hang helpless until cramp prises my grip from the rock and gravity sucks me hurtling downwards. Even now I can feel the ache building in my bent fingers, my outstretched arms.